I am still a pastor. That is my qualification.

Who is printing this

My name is Samuel Scalf.

I grew up on Colorado’s Western Slope. I spent fifteen years at one small church in Longmont, thirteen of them as lead pastor, preaching week in and week out and walking with people through grief, doubt, faith, and transformation.

I am also someone who likes to make things. I worked as a finish carpenter for years, and when our church needed its rooms to feel like home, I did the remodeling myself. I still unwind by building bikes and working on my own cars.

Somewhere in there I went back to school, twice, because the questions people in my church were asking needed more than I had. I finished a master’s in Bible at Luther Seminary in 2026. If you want that side of me, it lives at samuelscalf.com.

My wife Melodie and I have been together since we were teenagers. We have four daughters, and we live in Colorado, where we spend as much time as possible outdoors. Melodie runs. I mountain bike. We both agree that bagging 14ers is worth it.

Why a pastor is printing this

I have been in ministry for over twenty years, and in that time I have ordered, unboxed, handed out, and quietly thrown away more printed material than I care to add up.

I build for small churches on purpose. I know the names of the people in mine. I notice when someone is missing. A need gets met in a week instead of after a committee cycle. A small church is not a large church that failed to grow, and it doesn’t need fixing.

I pastored in a small church in Longmont, Colorado for fifteen years. I know how difficult pastoring a small church can be. Budgets are tight. People care deeply about their church and their community, and they expect you to use the church’s resources wisely.

I learned early that professionally printed connection cards, postcards, business cards, and invite cards were worth their weight in gold. I also learned that the world of professional printing is confusing, and the quality is not always what you expect. Sometimes the deal was too good to be true. Sometimes I uploaded the wrong file.

Pastoring a small church requires you to be resourceful and nimble. Often, the need to pinch pennies leads to holding on to printed materials that are outdated: an old logo on the letterhead, mismatched fonts from three different years.

What it does need is for the paper to keep up. In a small church the card someone is handed at the door is often the only physical thing they leave with, and it is carrying more weight than the same card would anywhere larger. I held that card once, wondering if I was in the right place.

That makes it a strange thing to order from whoever came up first the week you ran out. I’ve done that. That is how a welcome table ends up holding four pieces made by three different people in three different years, none of which look related. The pieces are rarely bad. They are just unconnected, and a visitor reads that before they read a word of it.

None of this is a resourcefulness problem. The person placing the order is usually a volunteer doing it on a Tuesday night, with money that came out of an offering. I’ve been that person. The problem is that printing is sold as though nobody had to be careful with it. Quantities are priced to push you past what you need, and files are expected to arrive print-ready, like a designer sent them. Nobody asks whether what you’re ordering is what actually gets picked up.

Early in my church planting journey, every Easter we would gear up for the big Sunday. Volunteers would stuff colorful plastic Easter eggs, we would pick the songs carefully, and we would plan out a new sermon series. It is true that new people are more likely to attend church on Easter and Christmas than any other time of year.

Conventional wisdom told us that Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) was our best bet. We were told that mailers were the grail of church plant and event marketing. But, in our experience, mailers were expensive and only resulted in one or two new families showing up to our services. Worse, every time we did a mailer, we received negative reviews on Yelp and Google Reviews, complaining that we were wasting paper and harming the environment.

We stopped doing mailers for events. Sunday Printworks can do mailers. We just wouldn’t recommend them. If you are looking for a more cost-effective way to make contact with your neighbors, check out our door hangers.

So the store is built to match how you already work. Quantities start where a small church actually needs them, instead of at the price break that talks you into two thousand and leaves fourteen hundred sitting in a closet when the logo changes. Files get checked before anything prints, so a file set up at the wrong size is caught on the website, not in a box four days later. Once I’ve printed something for you, I keep it, so next year’s order takes about a minute.

None of that is the part that matters, though. Any envelope holds a check. The ones on Amazon do it fine.

What a giving envelope can do is say something about generosity that sounds like your church. Most of them don’t. What a connection card asks decides what you learn about a visitor. It also tells them what you want. Those are decisions about what a church believes about who belongs. They are the ones I care about, and the printing is just the part that has to not get in the way.

I know what gets picked up off a welcome table and what gets left there, and I know what it feels like to need something for a particular Sunday and have it arrive on Monday.